Answered By: Chris Clouser

Last Updated: Jan 29, 2015Views: 480

Unfortunately, the IUP Library has no control over the EBSCOHost system directly. We can send in a note to their customer service department advising them of the problem, but we can't fix it ourselves. It might not even help to make a report. EBSCOHost probably knows about this issue but still may not be able to correct it. Their system is designed to construct a citation from fields in the database. A program says, "take the contents of the "Author" area, put a period after it, then take the contents of the "Year" area and put it in parenthesis followed by a period and then copy the contents of the "Article Title" area......" and so on. Whatever is in the record gets reproduced in the citation. In most cases, EBSCOHost does not create the database, but rather buys data from an original producer. I don't know which database you were looking at, but I bet that the article title is stored in the database as all caps and that's the way it was received from the database producer. Producers have not yet standardized how they enter data and the process of trying to automatically convert to something standard is VERY complicated (how to determine proper nouns, etc.) so EBSCOHost doesn't even try. There is note on the EBSCOHost citation page: "NOTE: Review the instructions at EBSCO Support Site and make any necessary corrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names, capitalization, and dates. Always consult your library resources for the exact formatting and punctuation guidelines. " What this tells me is that you can use EBSCOHost citations as a guide, but you need to review all your citations and make any changes as needed before you actually use the citation. I know that it's a pain in the neck. The EBSCOHost citations are better than not having any citation guide at all, but you can't trust them to be perfect. Nothing machine generated can be.